An Epic to Behold but not an Epic Experience.

[Ulug Beg]

I have been playing RTW now since October but my sessions have tailed off now due to Christmas and other factors, and I suspect I won’t be playing it much again until the patch comes out, so I thought I would share a few thoughts on the game.

The strategic map and battlefields are beautiful, diplomacy is much improved, I like the new element of family management, and skirmishes actually skirmish. Yes, there are a number of bugs in the game which have been detailed before on these boards so I’m not going to go through them again. For me they have not been showstoppers, and I’m sure many of them will be fixed in the patch. I think I have finally been able to put my finger on what it is about RTW that fails to grab me in the way that Shogun, Mediaeval, and then Viking Invasion did in the past - and continue to do.

With MTW I had to get into the habit of saving every turn if I was playing late at night suffering from “just one more turn” syndrome because if I hit that Turn button and a battle ensued it could take upwards of an hour to fight as I rewrote history, and I do need to sleep occasionally. Having saved the game I would auto-resolve the battle and then look forward to fighting it for real at the earliest opportunity. In RTW, with the exception of city assaults, I have yet to fight a battle that has lasted more than a quarter of an hour. Now whilst playing, if something comes up that I am assured requires my immediate attention, I can quite often reply with “I’ll be there shortly” confident in my ability to dispatch the barbarian horde before my other half gets agitated and accuses me of paying more attention to the game than life.

Battles are over so quickly in RTW. In general, units move too fast and kill too fast. Despite the size of the battlefields there is little opportunity to manoeuvre before a battle, and once it has started things seem to be over before you can even select the right unit let alone order it to do something. This is such a pity as the battles are truly glorious to behold but there is no time to take in the scenery during all the carnage. The scenery also seems to have little impact on the behaviour of your troops. I also suspect that it is because battles happen so quickly that it appears to matter little what troop types you have beyond generic cavalry, infantry and skirmishes – you don’t have time to exploit unique advantages. For example, I invariably forget to get my Druids singing because I am too busy coordinating the chanting and charging of my warbands.

So, one thing I hope the patch will enable you to do is slow down battles and give back that feeling of history in the making.

[Ldvs]

What bored me in MTW were these very 1 hour long battles, for it involved many reinforcement waves. In that RTW is much better, to me. However, I agree with you on the point that there should an option which would enable you to slow down units pace and killing speed for all those who share your feelings.

[Zorn]

Well, I usually have to fight (on average) one full stack army every second turn.
If all those battles would last an hour, it would take the whole hollidays to complete one campaign.

[Ulug Beg]

I do play slowly and pause a lot!

[dedmoroz]

Rome Total Realism mod slowed moving and killing speeds to an almost perfect condition.
you should give it a try...

[drone]

I definitely understand what you are saying. I have always loved the "just one more turn" rat-with-a-feeder-bar effect you get with a turn-based strategy game. On the downside, you get the "it's 4am and you have 3 hours before you have to get up for work" effect, but that is price for a great, addictive game.

With M:TW, when you started a war, you knew there would be a few key battles which would decide whether you won or lost. These battles might take an hour or more, but the stakes were high so you didn't care. The number of troops you lost in those battles meant a lot, and you knew you were going to lose some. Once you got going beating up on a particular faction, the feeder-bar effect kicks in, and the next thing you know it's 4am...

With R:TW, I just feel there are too many small battles, and not enough casualties on the winning side. So you can take one stack and leave a trail of crossed swords all over the map, and not really need to regroup for the next push. The battle speed and quick routing play their part, but I think the new strategic map is the biggest culprit. It gives the AI too many options for movement, so it spreads out the stacks. I love the idea of the map, but I don't think the AI handles it as well it it could. This eliminates the deciding battles, and just leaves you with a series of small pummelings that can be put off to the next day.

I also think that the city population's effect on the tech tree has something to do with this as well. One aspect of the "feeder-bar" mentality is that it is hard to remember the details of the build strategy across your empire the next day. You have a plan, and you don't want to forget it. Since you are limited by the city pop, in a lot of cities you just end up building most everything at a particular level while waiting for the poulation to rise. You end up building the same stuff everywhere, which takes away from the "one more turn" effect. Again, I love the idea of the city pop, but I think it takes away from the addiction.

Still playing, and I hope the patch fixes some of these issues. Combat can be fixed somewhat with modding. If the strategic AI is fixed (stacks, aggression, city maintenance, etc.), we will have one hell of a game.

[mike007]

I liked M:TW better. heres why:

* The battles. I loved the reinforcment feature. I know there is one in rome, but as somone else said., you can break an amry to easily (its not hard when the stupid enemy general makes a suicudal charge at the beginning of the game!, WTF is that all about?)

*Hostages. That was an AWSOME feature of medieval. I loved breaking an amry, then watchign that little ticker climb up, then slaughtering them all at the end! i loved that slaughtering sound as well.

*The tactical map was better. i like romes map, but i liked the idea of moving 1 province at a time much better

*archers seamed to be more important in medieval & you could find great speical archers like long bowmen & itailan archers.

*ROMES IS TOO EASY! on vh/vh i still kick the ai's ass.

* The game ends after u capture 50 provinces! i want to conqure the world god damb it!

[Ulug Beg]

I will have to try the Rome Total Realism mod after Christmas when my PC has its mid-life upgrade.

I like the added dimension of populations in your cities, but because you often find yourself waiting to increase to the next city size you do end up building things you didn't intend to build unlike in MTW where you could, for example, focus a city on spearman or cavalry. Maybe RTW is more realistic though; if cities were big enough they could pretty much build everything they needed. Perhaps what RTW needs is bonuses for producing certain troop types in particular locations like in MTW, or is it already there and I've missed it? I do limit myself to only building Spartan hoplites in Sparta when playing the Greeks.

Drone you are right - those hour long epic battles in MTW are worth fighting because they are few and far between. My typical style of play is to build-up, prepare for a war, fight that for a couple of years, and then recover for 10-20 years before the next war. It would not be unusual for some of my Kings to fight only a couple of battles or none in their entire reign, whereas others would be real 'Richard the Lion Hearts'.

And I had forgotten to mention the hostages in MTW. That is a great feature. In RTW after taking cities you can sell the population into slavery or slaughter them, it would be good to have the same options after a battle.

The whole Total War series was revolutionary because you played it at two levels - the strategic turn based level and the tactical battle level. Maybe what is needed now is third level of grand strategy. Realistically, nations were not constantly at war - although a few had a damn good try - but playing one year at a time when nothing is happening can get a tad dull. What if at the Grand Strategy level you set out your nations build, diplomatic, taxation and trading policies and when you hit the BIG TURN button it would keep running until something significant happened like your King died or somebody invades you - the way Masters of Orion 2 works. You would only go back to seasonal turns when you were actually fighting a war. This would also make it practical to have more seasons as I suspect armies could actually move a lot further each season than the game currently allows them to.